


Sorry my seance got you fired from Subway

by kowaidesuka



Category: Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, M/M, Minor Violence, Mutual Pining, subway tm don't come for me, via ghost stories
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-30
Updated: 2020-10-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27280594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kowaidesuka/pseuds/kowaidesuka
Summary: “Actually-” The hesitance in Lyon’s voice made him look up once more. “Can I ask a favour of you?”‘For you? I’d go to hell and back.’ “Sure,” he said instead.Written for Ephlyon Week 2020 Day 5: Modern AU
Relationships: Ephraim/Lyon (Fire Emblem)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 31





	Sorry my seance got you fired from Subway

**Author's Note:**

> Who would've thought I'd write another modern AU ephlyon fic???
> 
> Inspired by [this shitpost](https://twitter.com/didi_ebooks/status/1277125257615171584)
> 
> I would have loved to have done more for ephlyon week this year but ran out of time so uhhh take this old-ish idea I was sitting on for a while. Hope you enjoy ^^

“Um, a little more jalapenos, please.”

“Sure.”

A beat. Then another timid, “Could I have a little more, please?”

“Certainly,” Ephraim replied, grabbing another handful of the little peppers and sprinkling them across the open sandwich with ease.

Declining to add any sauces to the sub, the pink-haired girl (Neimi, if Ephraim had to guess a name, deciphered from her companion’s frustrated growls) awkwardly shuffled to the right where the counter was, readily opening her purse to get her payment ready. 

Ideally, Ephraim should have put a charge down for ‘Jalapenos - Extra’ for that sub… and all the subs she had ordered before. But there was something oddly endearing about the whole situation, of her defiantly ordering those abominations of sandwiches every time because her friend kept taunting her about her supposed low tolerance for spice the first time. Mad respect for her, even though she struggled with the sub through more tears than the average person, her friend laughing across from her (but still offering up some of his own abundance of serviettes to wipe them up).

Or… perhaps he was just too soft, like with his sister Eirika, or with the kids who walked in wanting nothing but cookies, much to the horror of their accompanying moms, or with… well. There he comes now, like clockwork, right when his shift was half over, unbothered by how his deep purple shawl trailed behind him and swept at the dust and dirt on the shop floor. 

Offering him a smile and a wave, Lyon sat in his usual seat, taking his laptop out and opening it up. Studious to the end, even though it was the break between high school and college and Ephraim couldn’t even comprehend bringing himself to actually do any study prep, much less do the ‘knowledge bridging courses’ that his best friend had been endearingly rambling about.

Not a minute later, the assistant manager, Marisa, came in, allowing Ephraim to take his short break. “Ephraim,” she greeted curtly, “stay.” He nodded, far accustomed to the awkward, stilted manner in which his coworker talked to people, and waited patiently for Marisa to smooth out her wrinkled apron and say her piece. 

“We’re switching up the shift roster for everyone,” she explained. “You’ll be working the evening shift and closing up, including the late shift on Friday.” Ephraim inwardly winced, but it was what it was. Two months back when he was applying for the job, desperate to have his father and all his talk of greater ambitions and applying himself off his back, he had put down that he was available for all hours of the day. Was he to know that the decision was a rookie mistake? Perhaps, but then again, he never had a job before his current Subway stint.

At least this way he could end his shifts walking out into the blissful cold of the night, rather than the blistering heat of the late afternoon.

“Alright, thanks,” he finally replied, and Marisa waved him off, taking her place behind the counter. Tethys came out from the back room, out of her uniform, waving goodbye at them with a cheery “Toodle-oo!” With a brief reprieve from his duties, Ephraim turned to the recent arrival of the shop, knowing, embarrassingly, from Eirika’s previous mockery of him, that he probably had some sort of intense look on his face, a look that probably revealed too much of his feelings if Lyon hadn’t been, as his sister put it, “an oblivious clown like you.” Ephraim didn’t deign to respond to that.

Ah, well, it was of no matter what his face looked like at the moment, since Lyon was too concentrated on his laptop to notice Ephraim coming up behind him, freshly baked cookie in hand (Marisa caught him taking it, and it’d probably be docked from his pay, but no matter). He felt that ‘entrancing’ was the best way to describe the look of the purple-haired teen’s concentrated face, as stupid and simp-like as it sounded. Then he actually turned to look at the contents of the screen, cracking a smile as he realised what he was looking so intently at.

“Studying hard, I see,” he said teasingly, startling the other teen, who sheepishly tugged at his bangs and alt-tabbed out of the occult community forum site so fast Ephraim could still see the imprint of the page’s spooky black and orange layout. 

“I… got distracted,” he admitted, flicking back to the forum site for Ephraim to properly look at. “Knoll forwarded me this site today. A lot of interesting discussion here, though most of the topics I’ve read before.” He spoke in a low, hushed tone, still embarrassed about his guilty pleasure. As if Ephraim hadn’t known he had this keen interest for seven years now. As if he didn’t find it absolutely endearing. “But there was one group of threads where you could discuss your area’s local stories and cases. I never knew there were so many fascinating stories of the supernatural, right here in Serafew!”

“Oh, yeah? Like what?” Ephraim prompted, taking a seat and sliding the cookie and serviette over. Lyon shot him a grateful smile, and took the cookie, chattering away about the various supernatural phenomena that shaped their sleepy little port town’s history.

“My shift is changing,” he added, as he got up to work the counter once more. “I’m working evenings from now on.”

Lyon hummed. “Then I guess I’ll be eating subs for dinner from now on,” he remarked, crossing his legs and resting his chin atop his hand. 

Ephraim shook his head, but couldn’t clamp down the grin that burst forth. “You’re gonna get sick of it.”

“Sick of it? Never.”

\------

Occasionally others, from their shared circle of friends, joined in their daily routine. Ephraim welcomed the clamorous distraction; one of these days he was going to get caught staring.

“Can I ask about the menu please?” Forde asked with a smirk on his face. Kyle, waiting behind him, looked like he wanted to smack the blond across the back of his head.

“Uh… the menu is right there.” He gestured vaguely over the top of his head. “It’s… pretty self-explanatory?”

“ _Dude…_ ” Forde looked devastated.

“All that aside,” Eirika brusquely interjected, “Your customer service? Atrocious.”

“I’m sorry?”

“‘The menu is right there?’” she mimicked.

“Well, Forde has been here, like, hundreds of times already.” Shaking his head, Ephraim turned to a pensive Knoll. “So, do you know what you’ll be getting?”

“Do I know what I’ll be getting?” Knoll echoes. “Probably what I deserve, in the end.”

“Okay… let’s just start with what bread you’d like.”

One by one, they ordered and collected their subs. Ephraim got out from behind the counter to join them at the two round tables they had pushed together. Barring his friends, the shop was empty, and it was nearly closing time anyway; despite management’s decision to keep the place open later than usual on Fridays, hardly anyone came in during that time.

They passed the time chattering about nothing in particular. Forde asks Knoll if he was free to come to his barbecue the following weekend. “Are any of us truly free, with the shackles of mortality weighing us down?” came the poignant reply. Eirika kept kicking at Ephraim’s leg under the table, just to be mean. It totally wasn’t that he kept staring at how _different_ he looked with his hair tied up to keep his bangs from sticking to his face from that particularly hot afternoon. Or that he seemed a bit off-put, fiddling with the straw of his drink.

“Hey.” While the others carried on a conversation about what happened at the last party they all went to (“And that’s when I had to take her drink away. She kept trying to call her uncle’s phone using my microwave-”), he nudged at Lyon’s shoulder lightly. “Everything good?”  
“Mm-hm.” Lyon nodded, but Ephraim wasn’t convinced. 

“You sure? You’re not still hungry or anything?”

His other arm tensed under the table, the movement drawing Ephraim’s gaze. All throughout the afternoon and evening, he had kept darting his hand back and forth from the bag, as if wanting to open it but thinking better of it each time.

“Actually-” The hesitance in Lyon’s voice made him look up once more. “Can I ask a favour of you?”

‘For you? I’d go to hell and back.’ “Sure,” he said instead.

“I read this story on one of the threads the other day, about a woman who lived in Serafew in the late 1880’s. She was the wife of a woodcutter, and it was pretty customary for her to accompany him on the job. One day she had come back from the forest… but alone, without her husband, who was nowhere to be found. Her friend found her just sitting on the front steps of their house, shivering and whispering, ‘It had to be done, it had to be.’ She had reportedly died from shock a few hours later. When the other townspeople mustered up a search party for the husband, it took quite a while until they found him, for the body was… the body was chopped to bits, with the very axe he wielded.”

The resounding silence was broken by Forde cutting in with, “And _then_ what the fuck happened?!” Ephraim hadn’t noticed, but the others had seemingly stopped their conversation to tune into at least part of Lyon’s story. He couldn’t blame them; something about his voice was compelling, drawing him in to listen closely, to hang on to every word.

“Well, that’s the thing. No one knows,” Lyon replied. “But…” he pulled out an old-looking board with a bunch of letters and numbers on it. “I managed to find out from talking it out with a few others on the thread that the location of the old house is right where we’re standing on.”

“Ah, so that is why you suggested we eat here today,” Knoll said, “and here I thought it was only because-” He stopped himself when Lyon cleared his throat pointedly.

“So you wanted to, like… talk to her spirit or something?” 

“In short, yes, I would like to hold a seance here. With all of you as the party. Um, if that’s alright with you, Ephraim,” he rambled out, voice trailing off in embarrassment. Ephraim wracked his brain, trying to remember if there was anything explicitly against the rules for… trying to talk to ghosts inside a Subway establishment.

“I don’t see any problem with that,” he said evenly, trying to ignore Eirika rolling her eyes. “No candles though, that’d set off the fire alarms.”

“Don’t worry, those are not entirely necessary. If you could, though, could you dim a few of the lights?” Ephraim acquiesced, going out to the back room to turn off about half of the lights in the store before rejoining them at the table, ouija board placed in the middle.

“Okay… I think we’re all set up. Now everyone, if you could please place one of your hands on the planchette? Just a few fingers would do.” Knoll reached out immediately, as if it was second nature to him, with Kyle, always to the point with instructions, following suit. The rest of the party reached out more hesitantly. 

“What’s the matter, Ephraim? You s-seem a bit shaken up,” Eirika said, as if she wasn’t stuttering herself.

“Oh, that’s right, I nearly forgot.” Lyon frowned. “I’m sorry, Ephraim. If you want, you could sit out, or we could end this.”

“He always gets so scared when Lyon comes over with his horror movies,” Eirika whispered conspiratorially to the rest of the group. 

“He does?”

“I do?” Ephraim echoed in confusion. He remembers not much from them watching the movies together, other than being bored of sitting around, fidgeting and bouncing his leg away, until the last time they had a movie night, when Lyon had reached out to put his warm hand over his own, soothingly rubbing at it with his thumb, which made Ephraim still and concentrate on just that sensation and- _Oh_. That was why they thought that, huh?

Well, the alternative was admitting the actual reason why, and Ephraim didn’t want to try and fight Eirika over her dragging the pointer around the board over the letters S, I, M, and P, much less confess his undying love right there and then, so instead he went in a deadpan voice, “I’ll try my best to be brave for your sake, Lyon.”

“Um… okay, right.” Lyon cleared his throat again, and began. “Oh, Felicity Burke, she who perished and left our world too soon. Would you come to speak with us? Could you give us a sign that you’re here?”

His breath hitched as slowly, the wooden planchette moved up the board to encircle the word ‘YES’.

“Good, that’s good… if you wouldn’t mind, would you tell us of the events surrounding your death, the one you weren’t able to tell before you passed away?”

One by one, the planchette spelt out letters on the board. F-O-R-E-S-T.

“Yes, that’s right.” Lyon leaned forward excitedly. “What happened in the forest that day?”

C-H-O-P.

“Chop?” Knoll asked, before the pointer whizzed to life once more, across the board.

C-H-O-P. C-H-O-P. C-H-O-P.

“I… don’t think I like this. No, I definitely do not,” Eirika said. 

“Ah. Perhaps we should stop then,” Lyon said decidedly. “Thank you for sharing your story with us, Mrs. Burke. Perhaps we could talk another time, if you haven’t found peace and left this plane of existence by then.”

A swift drag of the pointer, hovering over the word ‘NO’.

“No?”

‘NO’. ‘NO’. ‘NO’. The pointer repeatedly dragged on and off the word, until it dragged downwards to spell out another phrase. I-M-H-E-R-E.

“What?” was all Lyon uttered before the entrance door suddenly jingled open, “I’m here! S-sorry, I think I left my-”

The resulting scream sent Neimi screaming and flailing into her friend, sending them both careening into the half-closed glass.

\------

“And so even though you did the right thing afterward, and that Colm boy didn’t end up getting a concussion after all,” Gerik explained, “I’m gonna have to let you go. Sorry.”

“It’s cool,” Ephraim said. He was going to have to find a new job, eventually, but the situation did end better than he had anticipated, with Gerik promising he could still be a good reference and him parting with the rest of the crew on still-good terms.

“Sorry to ask this of you, again, but, since you’re already on your way out…” Gerik handed him a paper printout and a roll of sticky tape.

“Of course. It’s been fun, sir.”

As Ephraim taped the notice reading “OUIJA BOARDS AND SEANCES ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BE PERFORMED IN THIS SHOP! HAUNT YOUR OWN HOUSE.” to the glass at the front of the store, he spotted a familiar, nervous-looking figure standing at the outside of the shop. Quickly slapping on the last corner of the tape, he ventured out, calling out eagerly, “Lyon!”

He jogged up to the purple-haired teen, wondering again, how, in the middle of summer, he managed to stand wearing so many layers. Layers and layers of purple. “I hadn’t heard from you all weekend? Did you get my messages? Are you okay? It got a little hectic at the end, I think I lost you sometime after Kyle came around with his car to get us to the ER.”

“I’m… okay, Ephraim. And I got all your texts, I just… I feel horrible. And confused… about why you aren’t mad. About me getting you fired.”

“Hey, it’s okay, you didn’t get me fired. It was more of a joint effort between us and all our friends, actually.”

Lyon didn’t look convinced.

“Besides-” Ephraim moved closer to clutch at Lyon’s hands, watching as the other teen’s breath hitched and locked eyes with him. “Subway was fun, but it was never meant to last. Hell, maybe I’ll go talk to my dad. Help him with his business like he always wanted me to.”

“I suppose, when you put it that way…” He smiled, hesitantly.

“But hey, if you’re still hung up about it, there is something you could do for me.”

“And what is that?”

Ephraim squeezed his hands, thumbing at the other boy’s palms. “Have dinner with me sometime. Somewhere that _isn’t_ Subway. And somewhere where we’re… we’re not just friends.”

“Somewhere- you-?” Flustered, Lyon seemed to be at a loss for words.

“Unless you’re sick of me already?” He laughed. “You’ve seen me nearly every day since summer break started.”

“Sick of _you_?” Lyon smiled. “Never.”

**Author's Note:**

> funny how I kept getting subway ads in between writing this... please don't come for me subway <3
> 
> twitter: [kowaiakias](https://twitter.com/kowaiakias)


End file.
